Build your site as a theme
Write the whole front end as Liquid templates, edited on your machine — no build, no hosting to manage.
A theme is a small set of Liquid templates — a layout, one template per block type, and per-page templates for things like a case study or a location — that the platform renders on the fly from your live content. There is nothing to build or deploy separately: edit a template and the whole site updates.
Themes are written on your own machine with the command-line tool, in whatever editor you already use. Three commands get you going: "npx @contentive/cli link" to connect your workspace, "npx @contentive/cli theme pull" to bring the theme onto disk, and "npx @contentive/cli theme dev" for a local preview of the real site that reloads every time you save. When it looks right, "theme push" sends it to Staging.
A theme can list your content directly — "every case study", "every FAQ entry" — and paginate a long list automatically. Templates also get their own small stylesheet when one page needs a different look, and a theme.js file for things like reveal-on-scroll. If a template has a mistake, the page never goes blank: it falls back to a plain rendering, and the theme card under Settings → Deployments names the file and the problem.
That card is also where you see where the theme stands — which version is on Staging and which is live, when each was deployed, and the commands to copy. A workspace with no theme yet can deploy the starter theme from there in one click and pull it down to change.
Starting from scratch? Ask your connected AI agent to build one — see How do I connect Claude to my workspace? — then pull it down and make it yours.